For a match played on a slow, unresponsive surface that only ever showed the most fitful signs of life for any bowler, the first Test between England and Sri Lanka, which finished at Lord's on Monday, was an entertaining, nail-biting affair, no doubt. The game went to the last ball, with England denied a win after the visitors batted out the entire final day for a draw, finishing at nine wickets down.

Imagine, though, as No. 11
Nuwan Pradeep
nervously batted out the final five balls of the match to secure that draw, what a difference to England and to the match an extra 17 overs to take that final wicket might have made.

Those 102 balls were how many went unbowled over the first four days of the match. And, more than Pradeep, more than the featherbed pitch, more than the peerless
Kumar Sangakkara
with his typically faultless, nerveless, perfectly constructed 147 and 61, it was those 102 balls that cost England this match.

Both teams were to blame for the slow play that cost the game those overs—and, probably, both teams will go unpunished for it. That's because the business of ensuring that the mandatory minimum number of overs are bowled in a day is extraordinarily hard to police.

In theory, teams are supposed to complete 90 overs in a six-hour day of Test cricket, minus a couple of overs if an innings ends and another begins during that day. That's 15 overs an hour, or one every four minutes, which ought not to be that difficult to achieve. In practice, the only times it is achieved are when there are two spinners in a side, bowling half the overs or more, in places where the pitches are low, slow and more conducive to spin than seam: much of Asia, and these days also much of the West Indies.

Teams can take up to an extra 30 minutes to complete those 90 overs; this is supposed to be an overspill to deal with a rare eventuality, but outside spin-dominant countries the extra half-hour is now taken as a matter of course, and very often is still not long enough.

It may be an idea to make the extra time open-ended rather than limiting it to half an hour, forcing the teams to stay out until the required number of overs is completed; failing light could be a problem, but for example in the current series in England, where at the moment it gets dark about 10 p.m., there is really no need to pull the teams off the field at 6.30 p.m.

Fielding teams, and in particular the fielding captain, tend to be the ones who get punished for slow over rates. On the face of it, that seems fair enough: Bowlers are the main people in charge of how quickly each over unfolds, and endless consultations regarding bowling tactics and field positioning are perhaps the single biggest factor in slowing the game down.

But batting teams can also hold up play: by meeting for mid-pitch chats; going through extensive preparation routines before each and every delivery (the probable international retirement of England's
Jonathan Trott
alleviates much of this issue); endlessly poking and tapping the pitch (a practice known as "gardening"); repeatedly calling for changes of equipment and drinks of water from the dressing room; and so on.

There are also factors beyond the control of either team. Mainly they involve the Decision Review System and other matters that are referred to the third umpire. Tight DRS decisions, especially those involving disputed catches, can take five minutes or more—but other problems are more prosaic, such as the old one of spectators wandering around behind the bowler's arm.

The lack of a single reason for slow play can mean that match officials appear to be very lenient when dealing with it. You can't punish a fielding captain because the batsmen keep sending for changes of gloves, and so all sorts of allowances are built in, for wickets falling and third-umpire referrals and so on, meaning that a team can appear to bowl its overs egregiously slowly and no one gets punished.

It also makes it difficult to decide on an appropriate penalty. A measure such as banning the fielding captain for a game or two can seem a bit arbitrary when some of what they're getting banned for is beyond their control. Financial penalties don't tend to work very well: they are usually peanuts to well-remunerated sportsmen.

A brief experiment in Caribbean domestic cricket, which punished slow fielding teams by awarding the opposition runs just resulted in batsmen going as slowly as possible.

Cricket's commentariat likes to bang on about slow play in tones usually reserved for cheats and criminals, which may seem a little over the top. After all, cricket has faced several corruption scandals recently, which tear at the fabric of the game, threatening it existentially; an already slow-moving game moving just a little bit slower might seem like a pretty venial sin by comparison.

But it's making a game that's already a challenging sell to fans just that bit more challenging. As well as affecting the results of games, slow play deprives spectators of entertainment they feel they're entitled to, and that they've paid for.

In many places, particularly England, watching a day's Test cricket doesn't come cheap. Tickets currently on sale for England's next Test at Lord's, against India on July 17-21, cost between £45 and £90 (around $75 and $150) for a day's play. If you're paying that much, plus plenty more for transportation and refreshments, you really want to make sure you are getting a whole day's play—but the highly paid sportsmen out in the middle, whose wages you pay, don't seem particularly bothered about ensuring that you do.

It isn't surprising that Test cricket struggles to attract spectators. It is a hangover from a more leisurely era when a five-day sporting encounter didn't seem a daunting proposition. People only watch it in any sort of significant numbers in England and Australia, and sometimes it seems the game is doing its best to alienate the people who are still prepared, despite the cost and inconvenience, to pay a lot of money to support the game they love.

Witness the Test match currently being played in front of empty stands in Trinidad between West Indies and New Zealand; the same scene is played out across the Caribbean except when England tours, and across most of the rest of the cricketing world. This could be the future everywhere if cricket continues to show contempt for its supporters—and a game without fans is a moribund game.

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